Thursday, April 01, 2010

April Fool

Several people have pointed me to this article by John McLean. I don't really object in principle to ABC giving him the space to reply to Stephan Lewandowsky's previous article on peer review and the McLean paper. It's a commentary site, not held to the same standards as peer review journals.

And it shows.

There's plenty of fluff but the central lie remains: McLean claims that they data were not tortured and that anyway the thumbscrews were only used to drag out information about the lag from the evil liberal numbers, but in fact the correlations prominently displayed in the abstract and discussed in the text are actually calculated from the data after strapping them down to a flat board, gagging and almost drowning them. [They also admitted shooting JFK and being the mastermind of Al Quaeda.]

I'm delighted to see that so many of the commenters are by now well aware of this basic point, probably due largely to Lewandowsky's previous article, and are taking great pleasure in pointing it out to McLean in the comment thread. Better still, McLean is busy down there tying himself in knots trying to defend the indefensible. It's good stuff, you can find gems like

Oh, and apparently McLean's working on a PhD at James Cook University, where a certain retired prof Bob Carter has an honourary position.

But ABC conveniently omits McLean's connections to the Australian and International Climate Science Coalition. (They did the same with Plimer's various connections, so this obfuscation is par for the course).

Well, the first thing he'd need to do is remove the rise^H^H^H^Hnoise. Once that's done, what you're left with is the tide. Stands to reason the short term effect of tide would also explain any long term trends. Whoops! Did I say trends? I meant noise.

[Henning]Warming is an illusion. It's the illusion of warming.[/Henning]

deepclimate: ABC conveniently omits McLean's connections to the Australian and International Climate Science Coalition.

While our ABC has been wrong in a few ways (especially letting McLean have the only comment at the bottom of the article about Foster et al - should have quoted Foster) I'll defend them on this. Connection to the CSC would sound like a positive to the general public, so should be omitted because 'scientific advisor to ACSC' is "legend in his own lunchbox" - a leading member of his private treehouse club.

One of McLeans co-authors is Chris de Freitas. Chris is also a scientific advisor to the “Friends of Science (FoS)” [friendsofscience.org], a notorious Calgary climate change denial organisation. The FoS claim that the earth is cooling and that the only driver of climate is the sun. They do not distinguish between mechanisms of long term and short term variation because they do not distinguish between long term and short term variation. Check them out and send them a few requests to clarify this contradiction.